Posted: Mon 01 May 2006, 12:08 Post subject:
How Do I Get my 15" Widescreen Laptop to Display Proper

Howdy,

I checked the forum but couldn't find a posting that covered my situation (although I did see a similar post on a laptop with an ATI chipset).

I'm running Puppy 1.08 on a new Dell Inspiron B130. The screen is a 15" widescreen with what Dell calls, "Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, for Inspiron 1300/B130".

The default screen should be 1280 X 800. I can only choose 1024 X 768 or less in the Xorg wizard. All of the available resolutions have the wrong aspect ratio (4:3) but I need 16:10. Since my ratio is wrong all my images are squashed. I can read text fine, but the graphics display wrong.

Does anyone have any steps for fixing this problem? If I need special drivers, I've already looked at the Intel site but they reference drivers for certain versions of Linux. If I must use their driver, which driver from their site do I use?

I'm still new to Linux, but I can follow directions well enough that I managed to get my wireless network card working.

I know the most important thing is to know what to search for, now you know that video configuraition is stored in xorg.conf
Let us know if it works._________________http://rarsa.blogspot.com Covering my eclectic thoughts
http://www.kwlug.org/blog/48 Covering my Linux How-to

Strange. My xorg.conf had no insertion points. There was no monitor or device section. I found I was running xvesa so I ran the xorg wizard.

On reboot I was walked through the xorg configuration but the highest resolution it would give me was 1024 x 768. At least I had a proper xorg.conf when I was done but the driver was listed as vesa. Upon save session to CD and reboot I came back OK but xorg was not running, I was back to xvesa at 1024 x 768.

I remember seeing some program or probe I ran from within Puppy (don't remember which one) correctly identified the laptop embedded chip as: VBE version 3.0 (Intel 915GM/910ML/915MS Graphics Chip Accelerated Bios).

I've searched the forum and tried various bug fixes. I've manually
changed the driver in xorg.conf to read "i810", then "i810_drv", then "i915", and finally "i915_drv". At this point I figured a driver wasn't loading so I looked and there was nothing in lsmod that looked anything like a video driver.

I found the modules folder several child folders under /usr and saw a i810_drv.o so I tried to modprobe it. I get Modprobe: Can't locate module i810_drv. I've tried modprobe i810, i915, i815, i810_drv, i815_drv, and i_915_drv. All give me a "modprobe: can't locate module".

I've downloaded bug fix modules posted on the forum and placed them in my home folder. Still "can't locate module". Why can't it locate a module located in the most obvious location????

What does it take to get Puppy to load the Intel video driver? Does anyone have an Inspiron B130 or 1300 with this video chip and working drivers? Any guidance would be most appreciated.

I should add that I tried over a dozen variations of horizontal and vertical refresh rates in xorg but whenver the wizard ran the 40 second test I'd get colored horizontal bars or some other screen corruption and I get dropped back to 1024 x 768. Other places on the forum indicated that this meant I needed an Intel driver loaded.

Yeah, it looks like you might need the intel-agp driver.
The next snapshot of puppy2 should load that automatically for you, so
hopefully xorgwizard will allow choice of the 1280x800.
I don't know about Xvesa, perhaps it will benefit from the intel-agp driver
also ???

I don't think I mentioned that my goal is to create a multisession CD. I don't want to modify the hard drive on the laptop which came installed with WinXP.

My Puppy 1.8 multisession CD boots fine. I set up ndiswrapper and it automatically wirelessly connects to the Internet. After I get the video to function at the native 1280 X 800 my next goal is to make the sound work.

When I try Pup 2 I have to shut off ACPI or the xorg wizard hangs at a blank screen. I can modprobe agpgart in Puppy 2. It was late when I gave up last night, but I think I got the Intel i915 to load although, if I understand the lsmod report correctly, it is not being used. I haven't tried agpgart with i915 at the same time because I can't get the Puppy 2 CD to save the session (even though Windows XP says the disk was burned for multisession and there is plenty of free space).

I tried saving my session to a USB key but the file containing Pearl used to set up ndiswrapper acts flaky - it shows in the root home folder after boot but never acts like it installed. Since I couldn't set up my wireless Internet I stopped using the USB flash.

As another side note, the USB for the Inspriron B130 (=1300) acts odd with Linux. If you enable it in BIOS to be on at boot, Puppy either can't find it or will hang while probing for it. If you disable it you can't boot off it, however Puppy can access it normally after boot.

There is an i810 DRI/DRM kernel module, but I think you're referring to the i810 Xorg driver. This is not a kernel module and you can't modprobe it.

The 2.4 agpgart.o module clearly won't play with your graphics chip/agp bridge. This module is no longer maintained, and it won't recognise a lot of modern graphics hardware.
It was really just an optimistic suggestion anyway. I suspect that a solution with kernel 2.4 might be found by just tweaking the xorg.conf file... but it's getting difficult so don't bother ...
go for Puppy2 and the better 2.6 agpgart.ko/intel-agp.ko modules. And install the advanced DRI driver package from MU's site, too.

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